"As President Obama slips in the polls and more Americans express doubts about Democrats' handling of the economy and health care, Republicans are showing new signs of hope as they look to the 2010 elections."

Pragmatically, could that be a good indicator? I suspect that there is some correlation between the "likely voter" and the "strongly" crowd on both fronts.

That being said, the Democratic party is working about as hard right now to turn off voters as Bush did during his first term. Actually, it could be argued that this administration is functioning on party lines more than Bush 43 did (NCLB was a classic example of why bipartisan cooperation, disaster that it is). But with Palin and Limbaugh the ostensible faces of the Republican Party (right or wrong) where is a socially liberal but fiscally conservative voter to go?

[Edited on August 19, 2009 at 11:21 AM. Reason : Hell, where is a fiscally conservative voter to go period?]

"Daily tracking results are collected via telephone surveys of 500 likely voters per night and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. The margin of sampling error—for the full sample of 1,500 Likely Voters--is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Results are also compiled on a full-week basis and crosstabs for full-week results are available for Premium Members. "

"Republicans, religion and the triumph of unreason: How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality?

by Johann Hari, The Independent: Wednesday, 19 August 2009

Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital."

The election of Obama – a black man with an anti-conservative message – as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right's view of their country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin.

When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive landslide, it simply didn't compute. How could this have happened? How could the cry of "Drill, baby, drill" have been beaten by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American right's world-view – to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation – has swollen. Now it is all they can see.

Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and – at the same time – that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue that he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to... the Republican runner-up, John McCain.

These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of hard evidence – here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper – can pierce this conviction.

This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party now claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to euthanise the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed – with a straight face – that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.

You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually happening. The US is the only major industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves – and 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" – and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.

The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least because they are given massive sums of money by the private medical firms who benefit from the deadly status quo. But they can't do so honestly: some 70 per cent of Americans say it is "immoral" to retain a medical system that doesn't cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to make any life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved.

A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health corporations called Betsy McCaughey reportedly noticed a clause in the proposed healthcare legislation that would pay for old people to see a doctor and write a living will. They could stipulate when (if at all) they would like care to be withdrawn. It's totally voluntary. Many people want it: I know I wouldn't want to be kept alive for a few extra months if I was only going to be in agony and unable to speak. But McCaughey started the rumour that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced to agree to death. This was then stretched to include the disabled, like Palin's youngest child, who she claimed would have to "justify" his existence. It was flatly untrue – but the right had their talking-point, Palin declared the non-existent proposals "downright evil", and they were off.

It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are not in favour of killing the elderly – while Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against "death panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives.

These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS".

This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed – as one Republican congressman put it – that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them.

It's a shame, because there are some areas in which a conservative philosophy – reminding us of the limits of grand human schemes, and advising caution – could be a useful corrective. But that's not what these so-called "conservatives" are providing: instead, they are pumping up a hysterical fantasy that serves as a thin skin covering some raw economic interests and base prejudices.

For many of the people at the top of the party, this is merely cynical manipulation. One of Bush's former advisers, David Kuo, has said the President and Karl Rove would mock evangelicals as "nuts" as soon as they left the Oval Office. But the ordinary Republican base believe this stuff. They are being tricked into opposing their own interests through false fears and invented demons. Last week, one of the Republicans sent to disrupt a healthcare town hall started a fight and was injured – and then complained he had no health insurance. I didn't laugh; I wanted to weep.

How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have "faith" – which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don't have "faith" that Australia exists, or that fire burns: you have evidence. You only need "faith" to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.

Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason. He has had a two-pronged strategy: conciliate the elite economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they are stirring up. He has (shamefully) assured the pharmaceutical companies that an expanded healthcare system will not use the power of government as a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying in public that he "doesn't want to kill Grandma". Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre fantasies aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them.

This kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only be overruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people or the greediest constituencies. There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, "It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It's not how change happens."

However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarre cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America. Their new slogan could be – shrill, baby, shrill.

Really? UHC is a "move to the right?"Massive tax increases are a "move to the right?"Redistribution of wealth is a "move to the right?"Taking over entire industries is a "move to the right?"really?

Quote :

"Last week, one of the Republicans sent to disrupt a healthcare town hall started a fight and was injured – and then complained he had no health insurance."

That is an outright lie. The "republican" showed up and was accosted for being black and NOT supporting Obama. In short, he was attacked, unprovoked. yet, we don't look at this as an incident of racism. Instead, it get's twisted to say "he started it." I guess he started it the same way the woman wearing a short skirt "started the rape."

"But during the last election cycle, many of the actions of its leadership followed irrational and self-destructive patterns. Some of these included the following:

• Sudden bold gestures designed to draw attention and create some kind of excited response, such as McCain's announcement he was going to suspend his campaign during the economic crisis. These gestures were not tied to any overall strategy and they were oddly disconnected from the moment. They seemed like the actions of a child stamping his feet to get attention.

• Peddling the same, simple ideas from election cycles long past: lower taxes, less government, the need to return to the kind of values exemplified in small-town America. It was as if they were living in a time warp and had taken no notice of Bush spending patterns or the economic meltdown in progress or any of the other immediate concerns of most Americans.

• Emotion over reason. Facts did not really matter. If Sarah Palin could assert that Obama had palled around with terrorists, it was enough to believe that. Anything could be asserted as long as the emotions behind them were sincere and strong.

• Actions designed to curry favor with the base at the expense of alienating critical portions of the electorate such as Hispanics, all of this from the need to maintain ideological purity but ensuring an electoral disaster.

• The constant appeal to fears--the country being overrun by illegal immigrants, the imminent decline of Judeo-Christian values, terrorists in our midst, socialism or communism if Obama is elected, the loss of countless freedoms, and so on. The party of John Wayne had morphed into the party of Chicken Little.

• Constant whining and finger-pointing. If they lost badly in 2006 and were trailing in the polls in 2008, it was not because of their actions but because of the liberal media, or natural election cycles or whatever other rationale could be found. This prevented any kind of self-reflection or challenge to their cherished beliefs. Everything to maintain the bubble and the illusion that they still represented mainstream America.

Considering where they had been a mere four or eight years earlier, the turnaround and fall from grace was rather shocking. How to explain this sudden group neurosis, these strategies detached from reality? In fact, this transformation was not as sudden or radical as it seems. The seeds of this neurotic reaction go back several decades. "

"U.S. Rep. Lynn Jenkins offered encouragement to conservatives at a town hall forum that the Republican Party would embrace a "great white hope" capable of thwarting the political agenda endorsed by Democrats who control Congress and President Barack Obama."

"The RNC sent out a fundraising mailer recently. Couched as a survey, it contained one question that reads, "It has been suggested that the government could use voter registration to determine a person's political affiliation, prompting fears that GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system. Does this possibly concern you?""

"Salon.com, part of Salon Media Group (OTCBB: SLNM), often just called Salon, is an online magazine, with content updated each weekday. American liberal politics is its major focus, but it covers a range of issues."

the problem is not that Fox news attempts to appeal to a conservative demographic, but that they target people with an 8th grade comprehension level, and stack their content full of misinformation an innuendo.

[quote]Salon.com, part of Salon Media Group (OTCBB: SLNM), often just called Salon, is an online magazine, with content updated each weekday. American liberal politics is its major focus, but it covers a range of issues."

Hooksaw, I'm not sure you understood what I was asking. How do you believe that Salon.com put a liberal spin on the RNC newsletter?

not related to the thread, but related to your map..... That reminded me of a similar map I saw right after the election, comparing the presidential vote per county in the south to the bales of cotton picked in those counties in 1860, and the correlation is remarkable.

Cotton picked in 1860 is also correlated to your map above of African-American populations, but the election results just takes it one step further. Anyway, I was completely floored about how what happened in the mid 1800s still clearly has a large impact on the population today.

Salon is not a news organization like the WSJ or NYT, and they don't claim to be. It's a liberal website, much in the same way The National Review is a conservative magazine. Neither of these publications are trying to hide behind some kind of unbiased or "fair and balanced" curtain. They each have clearly states agendas, and their topic selection and articles support their agenda. no surprise there...

WHEREAS Senator Burr has stated publicly that he don't want the federal government involved in his health care - or anyone else's, and

WHEREAS Senator Burr currently enjoys health coverage delivered and paid for by American taxpayers, and

WHEREAS Senator Burr is obstructing millions of American taxpayers from enjoying that same quality of health care coverage he receives,

NOW THEREFORE we the undersigned call on Senator Burr to surrender his federal health care coverage immediately.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned "

I don't particularly think this petition will accomplish anything, but it is kind of amusing if Burr is saying he does want gov provided health care while for himself or anyone else while getting gov provided health care for himself.

"Republican Voters Say GOP Reps in Congress Still Out of TouchTuesday, September 01, 2009 Email to a Friend .AdvertisementSeventy-four percent (74%) of Republican voters say their party’s representatives in Congress have lost touch with GOP voters nationwide over the past several years. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 18% of GOP voters believe their elected officials have done a good job representing the base.

Most Republican voters (55%) say that the average Republican in Congress is more liberal than the average Republican voter. Twenty-four percent (24%) say the average Republican in Congress holds views about the same as the average Republican voter while just 17% think the Congressional Republicans are more conservative than GOP voters. "